The volume of wireless traffic and the number of wireless devices engaging in such traffic continues to increase. Cellular network operators are exploring many options to deal with this increased traffic given there is a finite amount of available bandwidth. One approach which has been studied quite extensively is offloading traffic to a ‘small cell’, which is a network access node that due to its lesser transmit power operates over a smaller geographic area than a conventional macro cell.
Many of these traffic offloading proposals have the small cell operating on a different radio protocol than the cellular macro cell, such as for example IEEE 802.11 wireless local access network WLAN protocols. In this case WLAN is integrated as a separate access network to the third generation partnership project evolved packet core (3GPP EPC). This requires extra cost of deploying the complete WLAN access network and also impacts the network entities in the 3GPP core network. Many WLAN offload solutions are based on this deployment model of distinct 3GPP and WLAN access networks using a common core with selective switching of flows based on operator/user policies. However, there is a general view that the operator does not have enough control on the WLAN usage and the WLANs deployed by cellular network operators have typically resulted in a very low utilization rate. Yet the load in 3GPP networks is overwhelmingly increasing and so the need remains to resolve this issue.